Schools We'd Like to Be Remanded To

Es gibt nur eine einzige Stunde, und die wiederholt sich immer. "Wie hat der Knabe sich zu benehmen?" Um diese Frage herum dreht sich im Grunde genommen der ganze Unterricht. Kenntnisse werden uns keine beigebracht. Es fehlt eben, wie ich schon sagte, an Lehrkraeften, dass heisst, die Herrn Erzieher und Lehrer schlafen, oder sie sind tot, oder nur scheintot, oder sie sind versteinert, gleichviel, jedenfalls hat man gar nichts von ihnen.
--Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten.

Afterlife

This blog is still dead.

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Blog posts I've read lately, while waiting for The Last Day at Work:

Bombs and Shields. Like the now-defunct Riot Porn blog, but with better editing. The focus of the blog post is that a "prison burns," while the newswire story raises the alarm about "undocumented aliens escaping."

Institute for Conjunctural Research: Especially this post on blind seething murderous life.

Lenin's Tomb pointed out this torture story that isn't a stunt in Vanity Fair.

And this series of posts from In the Hall of Mirrors, on being in a hospital in Germany.

Still More Kluge

[Kluge erzählt] von seinem jüngsten Vorhaben: "Das Kapital" von Karl Marx verfilmen. Sergej Eisenstein, der sowjetische Filmpionier, hatte vor 80 Jahren dieselbe Idee. Wo er scheiterte, wollen sich nun Tom Tykwer, Durs Grünbein, Peter Sloterdijk, Alexander Kluge und andere zusammentun, um eine 420-minütige Filmfassung des dreibändigen Werks zu erstellen. Arbeitstitel: "Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike." Antike deshalb, weil Marx, sagt Kluge, "einer fernen Zeit" angehöre. Gleichwohl sei er unverrückbar wie ein Gestirn und deshalb Orientierungspunkt für die Navigation in der modernen Welt.

Even more here, though actually nothing further about the Capital-film.

Kluge's 1970 Der Grosse Verhau was already a film of part of Capital.

Four Angry Men

"Reform Circus" is one of the extras on Disc 4 of Alexander Kluge's collected films. On a TV show called "Ende Offen" in 1970, Kluge is asked "What good is art?"

The producer comes onto the set; he splutters with resentment at the smarter, more articulate Kluge ("You just keep going on and on!"). All talk shows today are nothing but a "verbal shouting match (verbale Schaukampf)" as Kluge complained this episode of Ende Offen had become. So the show isn't remarkable for its lack of decorum, nor for its meta levels (the broadcast gets interrupted by its producer precisely at the moment the guests are critiquing the institution of television), nor for WDR's decision to broadcast the whole thing, including the interruption and the black screen and the argument about the interruption. It's something else.

Dramatically, the show works a little like "12 Angry Men"--it's riveting and not a little heartbreaking to watch Kluge try to explain himself in a forum that has no patience for him, for interlocutors who won't or can't listen.

Like Ende Offen's duller guests, I have also seethed inwardly while my betters showed me up in a seminar or a reading group, but often it's precisely those exasperating, long-winded people with whom I can create intensity of expression. ("You just go on and on!" is uttered only when intensity has failed.)

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I sat down to write a post that would link Kluge's parable forms with Shaviro's blog post on indexical, typical singular characters. Kluge's characters are indexical, but they're nothing like Dickensian. Kluge writes indexical life histories, in a way that has nothing to do, either, with the "'plausible' backstories and motivations" that dominate screenwriting today (both for film and television). But I didn't get that far.

(I find Kluge's miniature or parable form more in his written stories, not so much in the film versions. Jameson wrote briefly about this aspect of the stories in this October article I don't have permission to view on the web--about how abruptly Kluge's fiction shifts from historical to biographical time.)

Jubilee

Not only did I get my tax rebate, or whatever they're calling it, the IRS informed me this week that it has dropped its case against me concerning my 2006 taxes. ("Case" makes the proceeding sound far grander and Kafka-esque than it was, since it all happened by mail. A "postal shakedown," maybe.)

In the resultant burst of consumer confidence, I bought
"Collapse IV." Which looks very good, despite the fact that it contains no fiction by Antoine Volodine. I guess Volodine wouldn't have fit. He's not so much "concept horror," or even horror, more quasi-Blanchotien apocalypticism in decaying, vaguely Russian or Chinese cities.

Via Lutz Bassmann and Claro, I found that Dennis Cooper's blog has an interview with Brian Evenson.

The company from which I purchase my employee health insurance sent me a letter. The letter's writer, "X___," who identifies himself as a "data capture specialist," uses only uppercase letters. He informs me of a "PRE-EXISTING CONDITION" clause in my insurance; I can avoid its being invoked only by complying with some extremely complicated (nearly impossible) demands, among which are:

2. HAS _____ _____ BEEN SEEN BY ANY PHYSICIANS OR HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS BETWEEN 1/1/2007 AND 1/1/2008?
YES__ NO___

3. IF YOUR ANSWER TO 2 IS YES, PLEASE PROVIDE THE NAMES AND ADDRESSES OF ALL THE PHYSICIANS AND/OR HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS:

Here the data capture specialist has helpfully provided me with three blank lines on which to write those names and addresses.

Let me see here, X___, I'm just checking my records... I'm pretty sure I saw a Dr. Go Fuck Yourself sometime in the past year.

It's like that joke, "If you're a psychic, how come you didn't know I was gonna call you?" If you're a data capture specialist, how come you don't know that every doctor or "health care professional" I've seen in the last year has made me sign a HIPPA form concerning "patient privacy" which allows insurance companies access to my medical records? Capture your own data, fuckwit.

Unless you just sent me this ALL-UPPERCASE TWO-PAGE LIST OF DEMANDS so I'd give up and pay for my medical care by myself. What is next, X__, my data capture specialist? A message written with letters cut from different magazines?

Spurious's taxi driver was right, America's a third-world country. And IT was correct in writing, "There is something very vertiginous about the US, as if one false step will send you spiraling into a dark void of poverty and social isolation with little hope of getting back on track." The false step happens and the dark void opens while you have a job, while you have health insurance, not when or if you lose them.

Call this post my entry in Infinite Thought's "down with existing society" competition, and let the post's narrowness and fearful self-absorption say what they will about existing society.

Dead

This blog is dead.

Still, nothing is so furiously alive as a dead web site, as Matthew Stadler remarks somewhere, or words to that effect: I thought the words were here but maybe not.

Even before this blog died, a lot of its posts were about agreeing with other blog-posts. Now this blog agrees with Matt Briggs that this is an interview worth reading, especially on writing as a social act.

Degrees of Servitude

From "Repress U," by Michael Gould-Wartofsky, in The Nation. Nearly all the measures described in the article--security cameras in the classrooms, certificates of study in "homeland security"--are ones I saw firsthand at the university I briefly attended. I had thought such measures were peculiar to that place. There must still be some variation in how servile particular universities are.

Many students and faculty members are seen as potential assets. To exploit these assets, DHS has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland security culture within the academic community."

The record so far is impressive: DHS has doled out 439 federal fellowships and scholarships since 2003, providing full tuition to students who fit "within the homeland security research enterprise." Two hundred twenty-seven schools now offer degree or certificate programs in "homeland security," a curriculum that encompasses more than 1,800 courses. Along with OUP, some of the key players in creating the homeland security classroom are the US Northern Command and the Aerospace Defense Command, co-founders of the Homeland Security and Defense Education Consortium.

OUP has also partnered with researchers and laboratories to "align scientific results with homeland security priorities." In fiscal year 2008 alone, $4.9 billion in federal funding will go to homeland-security-related research. Grants correspond to sixteen research topics selected by DHS, based on presidential directives, legislation and a smattering of scientific advice.

But wait, there's more: DHS has founded and funded six of its very own "Centers of Excellence," research facilities that span dozens of universities from coast to coast. The latest is a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, the funding for which cleared the House in October. The center is mandated to assist a national commission in combating those "adopting or promoting an extremist belief system...to advance political, religious or social change."

Carceraglio Returns to Seattle

Updates soon. Soon-ish.

A Meatloaf Concert on the TV, A Goldfish on the Floor

When I watched Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent, I asked myself, why don't more people do that? Why don't more people go out that way, I mean, if they're going out that way anyways.

Well, it turns out they do, sort of.

Invitation to play that game that guy invented on his web site

The Trinketization blog quotes Adorno's Minima Moralia on the capacity for happiness. As Trinketization says Adorno says, "It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces...."

Elliptical as I'm being here (I hope), I spoke in Klartext there. My only profit on it is, I am cursed. Or pitied.

Trinketization's quotation led me back to Adorno, so I'll quote a different part of that same aphorism, "Invitation to the dance."

Psycho-analysis prides itself on restoring the capacity for pleasure, which is impaired by neurotic illness. As if the mere concept of a capacity for happiness did not suffice gravely to devalue such a thing, if it exists. As if a happiness gained through speculation on happiness were not the opposite, a further encroachment of institutionally planned behaviour-patterns on the ever-diminishing sphere of experience. [...] Prescribed happiness looks exactly what it is; to have a part in it, the neurotic thus made happy must forfeit the last vestige of reason left to him by repression and regression...

And, further,

... a cathartic method with a standard other than successful adaptation and economic success would have to aim at bringing people to a consciousness of unhappiness both general and --inseparable from it--personal, and at depriving them of the illusory gratifications by which the abominable order keeps a second hold of the life inside them, as if it did not have them firmly enough in its power from the outside.

Not that we're pessimists, Theodor and I. Adorno writes very movingly about happiness somewhere in Negative Dialectics. Wherever it is that he quotes that same parable about the kingdom of the messiah, which parable turns up in Bloch, in Benjamin, and in Agamben's The Coming Community.

Since this blog has gone all-quotations and no commentary, let me close by saying, you know who else has thought about happiness? Roger at Limited, Inc, and also Claire Colebrook. Colebrook wrote this great essay on happiness-through-the-ages (ages of philosophy), which was published in a slightly obscure journal of contemporary fiction called symploke. I look forward to the book version. I quote it in advance.

Im in ur jobz, making less money

"TutorVista employs 760 people,including 600 tutors in India, a teaching staff it plans to double by year-end.

Minor Notes

1. Blog-roll updated to include the correct address of Ads Without Products, instead of its old ghost address which is filled now with both ads and products. A w/out P noted the same NYT article I'd meant to write about: anthropologists as war consultants (Hearts and Minds).

2. Desertion is much on Carceraglio's mind of late. Carceraglio and friends may once have exaggerated desertion's virtues in certain derivative political pamphlets we wrote or claimed to have written. But we did not exaggerate by much:

Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection modifies the conditions within which struggle takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon; it modifies the context within which a problem has arisen, rather than facing this problem by opting for one or the other of the provided alternatives. In short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the game and throws the adversary off balance. --Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude

Return of the Weird

K-Punk announces the reprise and continuation of the Weird Realists' conference, December 1 in London, with speakers China Miéville, Ray Brassier, Benjamin Noys, and Graham Harman.

The conference announcement asks, "What examples of the Weird can be found in fiction, film and science?"

Carceraglio proposes Melville's "The Encantadas":

Man and wolf alike disown them. Little but reptile life is here found: tortoises, lizards, immense spiders, snakes, and that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature, the aguano. No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a hiss.

And:

On oppressive, clouded days, such as are peculiar to this part of the watery Equator, the dark, vitrified masses, many of which raise themselves among white whirlpools and breakers in detached and perilous places off the shore, present a most Plutonian sight.

Gone to St Charles Island, The Encantadas

Doubtless for a long time the exiled monarch, pensively ruralizing in Peru, which afforded him safe asylum in his calamity, watched every arrival from the Encantadas, to hear news of the failure of the Republic, the consequent penitence of the rebels, and his own recall to royalty. Doubtless, he deemed the Republic but a miserable experiment which would soon explode. But no, the insurgents had confederated themselves into a democracy neither Grecian, Roman, nor American, but a permanent Riotocracy...

--Melville, "The Encantadas"

The 9/11 Claimant

I am fascinated by the 9/11 "claimant," though, to be fair to her, it is said that she never put in a claim for any survivors' payments; she claimed her due only in the form of presiding over a survivors' organization, giving tours of ground zero, and making speeches. It's as though the authorized version of the 9/11 trauma discourse had invented this woman.

“What I witnessed there I will never forget,” she told a gathering at Baruch College at a memorial event in 2006. “It was a lot of death and destruction, but I also saw hope.”

I think of Borges's The Tichborne Claimant, though they do not seem to share much. The Borges version is about the brash success of an impresario's putting forth the loutish, dim Tom Castro as long-lost baronet Roger Tichborne. It's the disidentity that seals the Tichborne Claimant's success, according to Borges:

If an impostor, in 1914, had undertaken to pass himself off as the German emperor, what he would immediately have faked would have been the turned-up moustache, the withered arm, the authoritarian frown, the grey cape, the illustriously bemedalled chest, and the pointed helmet. Bogle [the Tichborne Claimant's partner and mastermind] was more subtle. He would have put forward a clean-shaven kaiser, lacking in military traits, stripped of glamorous decorations, and whose left arm was in an unquestionable state of health. We can lay aside the comparison. It is on record that Bogle put forward a flabby Tichborne, with an imbecile's amiable smile, brown hair, and an invincible ignorance of French.

This is not at all the 9/11 claimant's strategy. She has the resume of someone who worked in an important building, for an important company, on an important day:

She has told people that she is the daughter of a diplomat, and is described on the Survivors’ Network Web site as “a senior vice president for strategic alliances for an investment think tank.”

Biographical material circulated at a school where she was scheduled to speak listed her as a financial executive who had done work in the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, France, Singapore and Holland for leading firms. She said that she had started out as a management consultant for Andersen Consulting.

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As for her educational background, she has told people that she has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a graduate business degree from Stanford, though officials at both universities said they could not find records of a student by her name.

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“We had a long e-mail conversation over a two-month period, before we met, and shared our experiences,” Mr. Bogacz, who escaped from the north tower on 9/11, said in an interview. “The constellation of her experiencing the plane crash personally on the 78th floor and her fiancé’s being in the other tower and getting killed was just amazing.”

Nor did she neglect the detail of the kaiser's withered arm; her colleagues claim to have seen "the scars and marks on her arm that she said she suffered in the terrorist attack."

Collapse Is Back and Bigger Than Ever

Collapse Volume III will be available in a matter of days (mid-October, but order now; they only print 1,000). It will contain a collection of articles under the heading "Unknown Deleuze." Collapse III will not contribute to the literature that gathers Deleuze's scattered remarks on a particular topic (all those unimaginatively titled compendia: Deleuze and... Music, Film, Automobiles....). Nope; it's nothing like those. Collapse III aims to "clarify, from a variety of perspectives, Deleuze's contribution to philosophy: in what does his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate from other philosophers and how does he transform it? And how can the apparently disparate threads of his work to be 'integrated' – what is the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what are the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical concepts 'signed Deleuze' converge?"

And Collapse III contains two newly translated articles by Deleuze, plus a transcription of the recent Speculative Realism conference. And besides, the Collapse volumes are beautiful objects.

Krapp's Last Semester

Unlike the prisoner, the graduate student cannot say "you only do two days" (the day you matriculate and the day you ex-matriculate).

[I intended here a skein of apercus, citations, the odd link or two, an incautious confession. How much more often I used to post, and with more reading to report on, when I was "on the outside."]